


Pressure

by Winterling42



Series: Flesh and Blood and Dust [49]
Category: Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Daemons, Gen, Panic Attacks, Post-Canon, the daemons need character tags
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-27
Updated: 2018-05-27
Packaged: 2019-05-14 07:32:34
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,929
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14765286
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Winterling42/pseuds/Winterling42
Summary: Max is falling apart at the seams. Still, the last thing he expects is help from someone else's daemon. Even if it's Furiosa's.





	Pressure

Max had been at the Citadel for seventy-six days now, but spending too long in the tunnels left him with headaches and hungry ghosts nipping at his heels. It was strange; when he’d been on his own, with just Epharia and the wind for company, he’d done just fine surviving. Or at least, he’d survived well enough to live to tell about it.

In the Citadel, it didn’t matter how far he ran or how fast he could get out of any haunted room. It didn’t matter that he still carried a gun on his hip and knives in his pockets, though he was one of about eight people in any of the three towers allowed to do so. It didn’t matter that the War Boys ducked out of his way, that everyone in the Citadel seemed to know that he was a bomb waiting to go off. One of the Bullet Farmer’s missiles, left to sit in the sun too long and ready to blow at the slightest touch. Max was careening down some unmarked road, empty air on one side and stone-hard mountain on the other. Sooner or later, he was bound to crash. The only question left was who would be caught in the explosion.

It dawned on him, sitting curled in an alcove high in the Water Tower, a knife in his right hand because the gun could ricochet, and he really didn’t want to hurt anyone, that this was what Epharia had tried to warn him of. Before they came back. Being safe wasn’t a thing to treasure, not for him, because being safe meant all the broken pieces of Max Rockatansky could be allowed to fall apart. He had been held together by his car, by his daemon, by fear and desperation. None of those things mattered in the Citadel, none of them could contain the rotting bits of his mind that threw up death and gore all around him, even when it wasn’t there.

Max huddled in the blackness and tried to breathe, tried not to feel the scrape of a needle at his neck or ink in his back or fire on his neck. The dark, compared to what his living nightmares looked like, was a haven he longed for. Instead he saw blood and dust and crows and silver, chrome, shining like sunlight and burning like a fever. He couldn’t see, he couldn’t breathe, he couldn’t _breathe._

It was pain that brought him back. Nothing unusual there, but this wasn’t the cramping pain of a body forced into one position too long, or the wire-sharp pain of a blade accidentally pressed into soft skin. It wasn’t even the dull throbbing pain in his knee, which accompanied him everywhere and was measured by degrees of intensity rather than if it was there or not.

This pain was a piercing hurt, sharp enough to have broken the skin on his good leg. Max kept his eyes closed until his heartbeat slowed down and he was certain that he wasn’t going to slash out at whoever had stopped to help by, apparently, sticking him with some kind of garden tool. He was at the upper levels of the Tower, it was possible that one of the Wretched workers had found him in here. Max clung to that idea until his body stopped trying to split itself apart, and then he braced himself to interact with a human being, and only after that did he open his eyes.

Aurelio was perched on his good knee, eagle claws digging into skin through the tough canvas, watching him with two golden eyes that gleamed even in the dark of the hide-away. Max lost his breath, his mind momentarily unable to accept the reality of the daemon sitting not just close to, but on _top_ of him. This wasn’t a fight, where a daemon might forget the gut-wrenching pain of being touched in order to help their human. They weren’t in the middle of a chase, where Aurelio’s wing-tips brushing his ears might be forgiven. This was… Max couldn’t even begin to explain to himself what this was.

“Are you awake?” Aurelio asked, his head tilting to one side and then the other. Max nodded. “Are you here?”

Aurelio hadn’t been there, when Furiosa walked in on one of his first attacks. Epharia had been there, which made it both better and worse, but it had been Furiosa who drew them back, put the pieces of them back together and did not look away when he couldn’t tell if she was real. Max could count on one hand the number of times he’d seen Furiosa and her daemon together, simply close to one another. Which made it even stranger to find the little eagle perched on his knee now, asking him questions like daemons touching humans happened all the time.

“I’m here,” Max said, because the eagle was waiting for an answer. And then, “How’d you find me?” Because if the alcove was easier to see than he’d thought, Max could find some other place to collapse next time.

Aurelio shifted, rearranging his claws, which only served to make Max more aware of every place the daemon was touching him. It was utterly strange, utterly unfamiliar, and yet… and yet he could breathe deeper with the eagle on his knee. He could see the hall more clearly, and suddenly the smell of stone and water and white chalk paint didn’t seem so overwhelming.

“It was where I would have hidden,” the eagle said, raising his head to point at a rock jutting out from the wall, visible only in silhouette. “If I’d needed to get away.” Max huffed, a breath somewhere between acknowledgement and disbelief. The Citadel was a big place, and Aurelio didn’t fly inside the tunnels unless he had a reason to.

“Epharia sent me to find you. I can get around this place more easily than she can.”

That made sense, in a way that was so twisted about it looked straight. Max knew Epharia and Aurelio were working together, on some self-appointed mission that had them poking their noses into every dank corner of the Citadel. It no longer surprised him that the two daemons could be found together, like two parts of the same coin. It was only twisted up because they so heavily, openly, consciously chose to depend on someone else. Like Epharia, knowing that Max was having trouble, sending Aurelio to find him. Aurelio choosing to sit on his knee. To talk to him as quietly and carefully as if the two of them were human and daemon.

“Why?” Max asked, and Aurelio did not pretend the question had anything to do with the sentence he had said before. The little eagle daemon settled back onto his feet, pulling his wings close to his chest.

“Because we are not as willfully blind as you and Furiosa,” Aurelio accused. “We know what we are; the same creature, under feathers and fur. There is no more danger for me here than were I to sit on Furiosa’s shoulder, and Epharia would put herself under my Imperator’s hands as readily as I put myself in yours.”

Max was shaking his head, because he wanted to hear something else, something less strange, something less powerful. There was nothing left of him but broken, rotting pieces and a name that he did not deserve. Furiosa was the Last Imperator, the metal arm of the Water Queens, who ruled an evil place and made it good again. They didn’t need him. Max had come back seeking his own healing, but obviously the only thing he’d found here was bone-crumbling fear. Epharia had been right; they had no right to lay their madness down, to let these people carry their burdens.

Aurelio pecked him, biting at the arm that held a knife, and Max jerked back, scowling, to inspect the sharp V of blood that welled up from the torn shirt. “You don’t get to decide whether or not I’m right,” the daemon told him, the feathers on his neck and head rising up. “Furiosa needs you just as much as you need her. As much as Epharia needs me, and I need her. That’s the thing about being two separate parts of the same being. Once you know what it is to live with them, you can no longer choose to survive without them. After all, that’s why you came back.”

It was not a question. Max let the words run through his mind like water, soaking into every place they touched, starting new growth. Calming his reckless plunge down a road with no end but a crash. He’d survived crashes before, that was true. Maybe it was possible to survive this one.

Max stood slowly, shaking pins and needles from his legs. Aurelio went to sit on the rock above his head, and the road warrior, after a moment, sheathed his knife. Whatever had caused the attack, and whatever grip it’d held on him, had been dispelled by the presence of a daemon that wasn’t even his. Before he could acknowledge the fact that the walls were leaning in, mimicking a tightness in his chest that felt like another attack, Aurelio had returned to cling to his shoulder.

It hurt, the way all things hurt; the little eagle’s claws were hooked and sharp, and they would draw blood no matter how carefully he sat. The pain cleared his head, grounded him in the empty hallway and not the nightmares that clung like spiderwebs to the back of his mind. Max set off back towards the sunlight, a walkway, thinking to himself that he didn’t need Epharia to tell him how fucked up it was that being hurt that kept him in the real world. Not reassurance, or words, or even her love, but solid, concrete pain that he could feel.

“Will you tell her?” Max asked, as he walked out onto a walkway that was nothing more than a two-foot wide band of steel that arched between two towers.

Aurelio looked at him pointedly, and Max grimaced. “She already knows,” the eagle said, which was what Max had been afraid of. If he was going to stay, he needed to be useful. If he couldn’t get his engines running smooth, the least he could do was keep them moving at all. “She thinks you should talk to the Mothers.”

Max nearly tripped off of the strut and fell two hundred feet; his sudden change in balance prompted Aurelio to take flight, but the eagle kept pace with him, speaking more loudly over the harsh sound of his wings. “They know things the rest of the world has forgotten. They’ll be able to help you, Max.”

The use of his name had him grimacing again, but Max saw what Aurelio was getting at. The last of the Vuvalini witches had been a thousand years old before he was born. They would know something about curing nightmares. But the idea of exposing himself like that, having someone poke around inside his brain, was enough to make his skin crawl. “I’ll think about it,” he said as they reached the other side of the bridge. Usually that meant he’d be happy to forget and never think about it again, but he at least wanted to talk the idea over with Epharia. Maybe she would think of a way to get through it without damaging themselves too much. She always had been the smarter of the two of them.


End file.
